


All the Long Echoes

by reine_des_corbeaux



Category: Dark Is Rising Sequence - Susan Cooper
Genre: Bittersweet, Future Fic, Getting Together, M/M, Magic Revealed, Memory Related, Winter Solstice, memory recovery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-18
Updated: 2019-12-18
Packaged: 2021-02-18 08:22:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,669
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21841162
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/reine_des_corbeaux/pseuds/reine_des_corbeaux
Summary: A reunion, and a remembrance in the place where everything began.
Relationships: Bran Davies/Will Stanton
Comments: 10
Kudos: 53
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	All the Long Echoes

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Rimedio](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rimedio/gifts).



In the little phone kiosk, Bran could see his breath fogging up the glass as he waited to be connected. He drummed his fingers against the receiver, anxious for his father to pick up. Fortunately, Owen Davies was nothing if not precise, and he answered quickly. 

“Who’s this?” 

“It’s Bran.” 

“Well, I’ve been wondering when you’d call.” His father’s voice was warm. He sounded asily prepared to spend time exchanging pleasantries. 

“I’m sorry. I’ve been so busy with revision week,” Bran said, rather lamely. 

He’d intended to call his father earlier, but sometimes, reminding himself of home was too difficult and unpleasant. There was love there, certainly, but a kind of anger too. Most days, Bran wasn’t sure what he was angry about, just that a sadness lurked in the back of his mind. 

“But that’s over now,” Owen said. “And you’ll be ready for a holiday. So why are you calling now?” 

“Just to make sure you remembered I wasn’t coming home for Christmas.” 

There was a long silence on the other end of the line. Bran could picture his father in the little farmhouse trying to collect himself, maybe glancing longingly towards his Bible. 

“Right,” he said at last, drawing out the vowel as though it stuck in his throat. “You said you were going somewhere with a friend.” 

Outside the phone box, a train hooted impatiently as it pulled into the station. 

“Yes. And my train’s here so I’d better go.” 

Anything to end the awkwardness. 

“With that Drew girl, isn’t it? Anything I should know? Remember how you were brought up, Bran.” Owen’s voice was stern. 

“Dad, she’s a friend. Nothing else. We’re staying with her brothers too, and some old family friends of theirs back in Cornwall. Jane wants to get some research done too, maybe interview some locals. It won’t be a terribly interesting holiday, and I’ll be back in Clwyd for Twelfth Night, alright?” 

Bran glanced out of the kiosk and saw Jane waving rather frantically at him, mouthing something through the glass. Still, Owen Davies said nothing, and the phone pipped rather angrily. 

“Listen,” Bran said again. “the train’s here and I have to go. I’ll see you soon.” 

Still silence, even as the line went dead. Bran hung up the receiver, picked up his bag, and raced out of the kiosk towards a clearly furious Jane. 

“We are going to miss our train,” she said. “Honestly, Bran.” 

“Had to call my dad before he bit my head off about it. It’s bad enough that I’m at uni studying pagans. He’d never let me hear the end of it if I just dashed off to Cornwall without so much as a by-your-leave.” 

“Well, whatever your reason, we’ll have to run.” 

***

By the time they were seated on the train, it had begun to snow. Thin, anemic flakes danced past the windows, hardly sticking, but still speckling the slate-gray sky above. The train blurred it as they left Cardiff and whizzed through the countryside, Wales blurring outside the window. He watched the scenery slide past, letting the train rock him into sleep. 

Bran’s dreams were always the same, or at the very least, they followed the same script without fail. In them, he was twelve again, and he was frightened and determined. Sometimes he was running, sometimes riding on the back of some indistinct horse. He had to find something, and he had to do it before something terrible happened. Metallic shadows glinted hazily in the dream-gloom around him, and he feared he’d become lost in mists at every side as he ran or rode or walked towards a tree he could never quite see, or a ship he could never quite reach. 

But in front of Bran, no matter whether he rode or walked or ran, there was always another boy. His back was to Bran, and Bran knew that if he were only to turn around, he would know and remember everything. Seeing his face would be like reading a book, telling a story of some long-lost year, unmoored from time, distant as a half-remembered dream. 

And then Jane was shaking him awake and away from the misty world of unquiet dreams. 

“We’re almost to St. Austell.” 

“Mmm,” Bran mumbled, still half-asleep, still trying to remember what he’d forgotten in the first place. 

The dream was already receding to a distant place, and Bran felt a little sheepish for dozing. He stared out the window, avoiding Jane’s reproachful eyes. They’d left the fragmentary snow far behind in Wales, he saw. The sky was a darker grey here, drizzling down rain onto grey streets and grey roofs. The sea, Bran was sure, would be steel-colored when they saw it, perhaps darker yet than even the sky. The low, jagged skyline of the town blended with the clouds, all melding its greys together, and to Bran’s eyes, it was if all the color had been leached out of the world. 

And hadn’t it been, in a way? Wasn’t that what growing up meant, to lose all color and live in greys forever? Home had been magical, every bird able to speak, and Cader Idris had really been Arthur’s Seat when Bran was eleven. He’d loved the valley, and he’d wanted nothing more than to stay there. But as the years wore on and the magic wore out, Cader Idris became nothing more than a great hulk of rock, and the birds only squawked tuneless nonsense. By the time he was sixteen, Bran wanted nothing more than out. The mountains had grown heavy and tight around him, and the misty, endless sky pressed down and crushed him beneath its weight. 

That was where the music came in. Only when he played the harp did he feel the magic slipping back into his life. And when the evening light through the window struck the strings and turned them gold for half a moment, Bran always felt a curious ache in his chest, as though he’d lost something in a world beyond human recollection. 

So he’d left the valley to chase the music, to chase the past, to chase the magic. Bran’s only ties to his home were music, memory, and a disapproving father. Cardiff held the future, and maybe someday, he’d leave Wales altogether. Maybe then he wouldn’t be haunted by the ordinary world, and by the nagging feeling that something more lurked elsewhere beyond the horizon. 

***

Trewissick was exactly the sort of small, quaint fishing village Bran had feared it would be. It was a place that tourists could call things like “charming” and “traditional”, and they’d leave thinking they’d seen the real Cornwall, whatever that meant. City people always wanted “real”, Bran thought. But they never wanted truth. Real was quaint and picture-postcard-pretty. Truth sucked the life out of you and made you happier than anything else. Bran knew truth, because he’d grown up in a place twined with its old ways and stuck in its ancient habits. And he wanted to escape that truth as much as he hoped it would never let him go. 

The Drews were city people, and though they were perhaps more aware of authenticity than the average city person, they still were interlopers in Trewissick. Bran himself was an interloper there. He’d finally admitted that on the second day, realizing that for once, he was the tourist in the picturesque small town. It was his turn now to visit shops and coo over vistas, rather than to turn his nose up at visitors and accept their money with a sneer. But, as he’d always done from childhood in moments of discomfort, Bran pulled away from friends rather than tell them anything. He watched the Drews exclaim over things that hadn’t changed since they’d visited the town as kids, and things that had. He listened to Jane read him her notes on the Greenwitch ceremony. He tried to be grateful for being so far away. 

But the ache remained, and the dreams returned and returned. 

***

A few days after arriving in Trewissick, Bran stepped out of the rented cottage to walk down to the sea. It was another grey day, the sky spitting down fretful, half-frozen rain, the sea chopped and ragged with white foam, and the headlands rising ominous against a glowering sky. All the ground needed was a thin rime of frost, Bran thought, and it would be a perfectly dreadful winter day. It was the twenty-first day of December, and he was miserable. 

He’d had the dream again that night, chasing him back towards the past and the boy whose face he could never quite make out. A rhyme had echoed in his head, and he grasped for shards of it, for a few words he might recognize in the unforgiving dark, but it vanished in the morning light as he sat up gasping, waking a rather disgruntled Barney in the grey early morning. Bran had, after that, decided to make himself scarce for the morning, and so he walked, stomach growling, down to the sea. 

The streets were empty so early on such a day, void of tourists, with only the occasional man headed down to the harbor. Bran walked forward, heavy-hearted, onto the stones of the quay. The water was black and oily under the sky, and he could not seem to see any further than the rough surface. 

It was only when he looked up that he noticed the person on the end of the quay. He had his back to Bran, but something about him seemed familiar. As if, were Bran to see his face, all questions would be answered, and nothing more would need to be said. Maybe he’d find peace if he spoke with him, whoever the strange young man was. And so, Bran walked, and as he walked, the other person turned around, and the memories jolted Bran like a shock of lightening. 

“Will?” he gasped. “Will Stanton?” 

He’d gotten older, no longer the boy Bran had known during the hazy summer when they’d been, but enough was the same that he remained recognizable. He still had the same dreamer’s eyes and too-long brown hair, the same propensity for simple garments. Though he was taller now, he still seemed flung out of time to Bran, as if he was only visiting from some distant place in the far future or shadowed past. 

They had never been more than summer friends, really, or maybe they had been more. Those years had blurred with the changing of the seasons, and Bran could never quite remember if he’d slotted Will in at Cafall’s death, or if he’d really been there to help. All he knew for certain was that once he’d known Will, and he and the Drews had spent a summer near Bran’s home, a summer that was always just out of reach in his memories and sitting like a misty border between the then of magic and the now of dull, unchanging reality. 

“Why are you here?” Will asked. 

There was no welcome in his voice, but his tone was still as strangely empty as it had always been in the past. He hunched into his coat, still standing far too far away from Bran, and Bran remembered his dream again. Brown hair. Indistinct clothes. That awful, clutching feeling of loss. He couldn’t answer Will. 

“I think I’ve been dreaming about you,” he said instead. 

Will started, and for half a moment, Bran thought he might leap into the water and swim away. But he composed himself and stood still. 

“It’s normal to dream about the past,” he said after a careful moment or two, still watching Bran with a curious gaze. 

“I know it’s normal, but this isn’t normal. I’ve been dreaming every night since I was a kid, and it’s always someone I can’t quite see, and I know if I get to him, I’ll know everything that I can’t remember.” 

Will laughed, and it was the best sound Bran had heard in years. He hadn’t realized you could miss someone you’d only known for a handful of summers with the same intensity and fierceness you could miss someone you’d known for years and years. 

“You’d even remember where you left the key to your flat?” 

Bran blushed scarlet. 

“I don’t mean that. I mean all the things about that summer and before. When you were sick, and I was lonely. When we were friends.” 

Will looked away, back out over the sea 

“We all want to remember things. Sometimes we shouldn’t.” 

“Yeah, I know. But I’m remembering more every time I wake up. Last night I heard a rhyme, and this morning there were still bits of it, stuck in my head like a song.” He looked down. The stones of the quay were shiny with moisture. The water was still black and roiling with foam. Then, there was a hand on his shoulder, a soft, light touch. 

Will was standing next to him, and Bran felt a sudden desire to look into his eyes, or to touch him back. He couldn’t explain the sudden need, but it overtook him, and the longing flooded up through him, forming a lump in his throat. And all the while, Will looked on with his stern, dark eyes. 

“Do you still play the harp?” Will asked quietly. 

“Yeah. Dad doesn’t like it, but I don’t care what he thinks, really. I keep disappointing him, but I suppose that’s just growing up. What have you been doing?” 

Will shrugged. 

“I’ve been places. Seen things.” 

None of the usual words, nothing about books or uni or bands. It was an evasive reencounter, and Bran felt like he was running all over again, trying to find out what had been left behind and left unsaid. 

“I couldn’t go to the conservatory for harp,” he said, finally, “so I’m studying history instead. The old stuff. The people who were here before the Romans, maybe. But I’ve always been interested in the people the Romans left too. I’m Welsh. The stories of Arthur are in my blood.” 

Will looked at the horizon, a pained expression on his face. 

“Of course.” His voice was measured, as if he feared to say too much. 

They stood on the dock for long moments, watching the gray undulations of the sky. 

“Do you remember the Drews?” Bran asked. 

“Of course.” 

“They’re here too. I think they’d love to see you. Jane would want to tell you all about why she’s here. She saw some kind of thing here as a kid, some old ceremony, and it never left her mind. So she’s all interested in folklore now. Trying to collect the old stories before they all vanish. Guess we’re both trying to navigate the past before people stop remembering. Because I know what it’s like to forget.” 

Bran paused. He wanted to clap a hand over his mouth and chide himself for stupidity. Forgetting! What had he even forgotten? But Will stood there stone-faced, and Bran couldn’t stop his foolish, traitor tongue. He swore softly under his breath in Welsh, cursing himself for babbling like an idiot. 

“And you want to remember,” Will said at last. “Are you certain?” 

“I’m certain,” Bran said, forcing conviction into his voice. 

“I cannot promise that you won’t regret what you hear.” 

“What can you tell me?” 

“Everything. Meet me on the headland tonight, well after dark.” 

It was like some ridiculous spy film, Bran thought. An exchanging of information on a Cornish headland in the middle of the longest night of the year. And yet, in this ridiculousness, he would finally find the answers he sought. He nodded. 

“I’ll meet you then.” 

***

The night was freezing, and Bran hunched into his coat, occasionally blowing on his chapped and cramping hands to warm them. The wind off the sea blew in great gusts, and clouds rose out over the water, occasionally obscuring the bright pinpricks of the stars and the heavy, bright moon. 

Up here, the grass rustled softly in the wind, stiff with frost. Bran thought of the Greenwitch Jane talked of constantly. Perhaps this was the headland they pushed it off, into the dark, churning waters below. The whole ceremony suddenly seemed much more sinister when he thought about it now in the dark and the cold. Everything did. 

A cloud rolled across the moon, and Bran turned away from the sea. He hoped that if he peered long enough down the path, he might see the faint lights of a house or two, to convince him that he was not alonge, and that life was only a quick dash away from this cold and empty place. But all the lights seemed to be extinguished tonight, and the only illumination came from the frosty stars and the cold, distant moon. 

Footsteps sounded up the path, crunching against the frosted grass, and Bran saw Will making his way up the path towards him, his breath steaming out in a hurried cloud. 

“You’re early,” he said at last to Bran. “You really do want this, don’t you?” 

Bran nodded. He was remembering more glimpses of the hazy summer, more thoughts of comfort and how he’d longed, more than anything else, to spend all his time with Will. But Will had always been distant, and he’d grown more distant at the end of the summer. He hadn’t answered Bran’s letters, not in the way Jane had. It had been as if Will had vanished utterly from the earth, and Bran had gotten on with the business of living in the dull, sluggish present. 

“I do,” he said. “I’m sick of forgetting.” 

“You must be. You’re making yourself remember even past the dreams, despite all the efforts of the Light.” 

He said Light as though it had a capital letter, imbuing the word with an earthy, ancient gravitas. Bran shivered. 

“I don’t know what I can say to bring them back fully, or if I can undo what all the Old Ones together have wrought by myself, but I can try. I don’t know if you’ll believe me.” 

Will again looked away, out at the massing clouds over the sea. They were blotting out the stars, heavy and grey. 

“I can try. I don’t know why I keep dreaming about you, or why I can’t remember anything about that summer. I know something must have happened, because summer friends don’t write each other letters for years and become proper friends in uni. Summer friends don’t dream about other summer friends.” 

Before he knew it, Bran grabbed Will’s hand, as if he was a desperate petitioner for sanctuary. His hand was warm, dry, utterly alive. As Bran held his hand, memories swam into his mind. A golden harp. A falling city. A rider on horseback, swathed in white. They were fragments, indistinct as illustrations in a half-remembered book, but they surged through his mind and sang in his blood. Perhaps touch, then, was what would summon the memories back. 

“We were more than summer friends, and I am more than human,” Will said finally. “We saved the world together with the Drews. It would take too long to explain the whole structure of the world to you again, since those powers have decreed that you should forget. But it is the winter solstice tonight, and the barriers that keep things hidden have grown slimmer. So, perhaps, you can find something. Remember who you were and what we were.” 

Still thinking on touch, Bran clasped Will’s hands. 

“I think I know a way,” he said, and kissed him. 

His lips were warm. Bran thought of his comment about not being human, and shoved it aside, because Will tasted human. While this was more perfunctory than the few fumbling, sloppy kisses he’d shared in the past two years in dank dorm rooms and dirty flats with boys he barely knew, it felt like more, somehow. 

The sky, at that moment, decided to unleash the snow it had been holding, white flakes fluttering down over the frozen headland and the dark sea, but Bran continued to kiss Will, and Will kissed him back. And with every movement, the memories came back. Swords, mistletoe, the Light, the Dark, the Grey King, and King Arthur. And all of it was lost, but all of it was here. Bran broke away, realizing his eyes were full of tears. 

Will looked at him, perplexed. 

“I wasn’t expecting that,” he said. 

“I thought if I touched you more, I’d feel something more. I’d remember more. It’s like you carry memories in your body or something. Is that part of being an Old One?” 

Will smiled. There were snowflakes in his eyelashes. 

“I don’t know,” he said at last. “There’s so much I know, and so little I understand.” 

Bran’s mind roiled with memories, things slotting into place, and then flying away again, intangible as dreams. 

“I don’t know that I’ll remember all this come morning,” he said at last. “And I don’t want to forget.” 

Will smiled, and his face was a light in the darkness and snow. 

“Let’s meet again before you leave,” he said at last. “Somewhere warmer. We can talk.” 

“Exchange telephone numbers, maybe? Can Old Ones use phones?” 

Will laughed. “We really are mostly like humans, only different. And I like that. I have a feeling I’ll be seeing you again, Bran Davies.” 

Bran thought of the kiss, of the memories, of the no-longer-hazy summer. 

“You’d better,” he said. “I don’t intend to let you leave or stay away again.” 

The snow swirled thickly all around the headland as they walked away, their boots making dark prints in the shallow drifts, hand in hand. Snow covered their tracks as they vanished over the rise. 

Bran, looking up at the shrouded, pale heavens, thought he could hear bells, or perhaps song. The world had righted itself, and all that stretched before him now was full of color and light. 

**Author's Note:**

> Title is from "The Shortest Day" by Susan Cooper, because while The Dark is Rising is not a nostalgia fandom for me, the Christmas Revels are very much a nostalgia thing for me, and it felt right to link the two. 
> 
> Hope you enjoy!


End file.
